Women Leaders and Social Performance: Evidence from Financial Cooperatives in Senegal

Abstract

How do women leaders such as board members and top managers influence the social performance of organizations? This paper addresses the issue by exploiting a unique database released by a Senegalese network of 36 financial cooperatives sharing identical governance characteristics and placed under the authority of a central union. We scrutinize the loan-granting decisions, made jointly by the locally elected board and the delegated top manager, whose career is supervised by the central union. Our findings are threefold. First, female-dominated boards favor social orientation in loan-granting. Second, female top managers are not necessarily more socially oriented than their male colleagues. Instead, they tend to align their loan-granting strategy with the preferences of the democratically elected board members. Third, the central union tends to assign male managers to cooperatives with female-dominated boards, probably to curb the social orientation of these boards. Overall, gender is a key factor in considering social performance, but gender interactions appear far more complex than previously thought.

info:eu-repo/semantics/published